Winsbury's Literary Prowess
by themicemen
Summary: Gunnerkrigg Court. Winsbury thinks he's being so clever but Mort's morals call for censorship. Written for Yuletide 2009. William Winsbury, Janet Llanwellyn, Mort.


"_William, my dear!"_

"_Janet, my sweet!"_

"_Oh, dearest William!"_

"_Sweetest Janet!"_

Winsbury stared at what he had written in disgust, his now-blunt pencil tap-tapping his frustration out on to his copybook. He ran a hand through his hair a few times.

Too exclamatory. Too soggy. For all their secret, passionate love, he and Llanwellyn had so far fallen short of sounding like anything from a Mills & Boon. Not that Winsbury would admit to knowing what anything from a Mills & Boon would sound like.

He gave the page a last once-over and ripped it from the book. Its crumpled form was pushed with distaste into the open drawer by his hand. Inhaling with imagined determination coursing through his veins, Winsbury once again put pencil to paper.

_A fair maiden of unimaginable beauty and immeasurable grace lived in an enormous castle surrounded by numerous ladies-in-waiting. She was guarded by a ferocious, knight-eating dragon..._

* * *

Mort moped when there was nothing to do. A large part of his day consisted of doing nothing so a large part of his day was dedicated to moping. He had moping down to a fine art—so good at it that institutions of higher education should seriously consider conferring him with an honorary degree in moping. He was Master of the Mope!

These days, though, he spent a lot of time just waiting. Waiting for Annie, maybe even her friend Kat, to come and pay him a visit. There was nothing to do when they were not around. Well, less than the usual nothing.

_Clunk._

Mort spun around. _What was that?_

_Thud._

"Ow! That hurt!"

"What in blazes do you think you're doing?"

Huh.

Mort drifted around the corner. There was a cacophonous symphony of things falling from high places, hard surfaces coming into jarring contact and the rather ambiguous protests of two people caught up in the middle of it all.

A janitor's closet opened and out fell a bucket, a boy, two mops and a couple of broom handles.

Then _that girl_ stormed out and Mort turned a paler shade of pale.

"William! A closet? Obviously your sense of propriety has been skewed by falling asleep in class all the time."

Hands were on her hips now, elbows jutting out fiercely. Mort's ghostly spine remembered the chill of that glare cutting through it.

"Eglamore's taking us for archery today."

A disinfectant bottle rolled out. Llanwellyn gave it an angry punt and it bounced off the ceiling and around the corner to fall through Mort.

"And now we're late!"

She stormed off.

The boy, William, had the makings of a superb shiner below his dark-ringed eyes.

* * *

_The feisty sorceress Janetta sat atop her throne of smoke-darkened stone and cast bolts of fire down upon the visitor. Her hair whipped around her shoulders and her eyes smouldered with godly rage..._

Janetta...

Winsbury frowned and rubbed it out. He put a mark next to 'godly'—he would return and substitute it for a better word later.

"_Your timing is inopportune, mortal man!" her voice reverberated off the walls of the empty cavern. "Begone before I set you more misfortunes to suffer!"_

_Guillaume turned and ran from her presence..._

Winsbury tore the appropriate pages out and shuffled them into some semblance of order. He numbered the bottom right-hand corners and stuffed them into a drawer with the rest of his literary feats.

Giving a hurried glance to the clock, he tumbled into bed.

* * *

Bobbing up and down the halls did not quite have the same appeal, Mort reflected after barely twenty minutes of the futile exercise in self-amusement. He decided to float through some walls.

Classroom. Hallway. Another classroom. More hallway. Another class—

_Good lord._

"Did you see that?"

"What?"

"I thought I saw someone come in."

The rustle of clothing and then the _thunk_ of a head connecting with something hard. Probably the wall.

"No, seriously. I'm going to check outside."

Mort made himself scarce.

* * *

_The Count von Winsburg bent the supple form of the Lady Llan de Wellyn over the back of one of his plush chaises longues. The morning fingers of sunlight reached through the gaps in the lace curtains to caress her languid form. He bent down to undo..._

Winsbury abruptly put down his pencil and loosened his tie. He ran both hands through his already mussed hair in a flurry of emotion.

_...the various buttons of her silken blouse..._

His head whipped around, the hairs on the back of his neck rising in the presence of something supernatural.

There was nothing to be seen.

_...to reveal the..._

There was someone in the room with him. It was either a side-effect of his over-active imagination or his guilty conscience coming to the fore but Winsbury felt that no more writing could be done that day under this atmosphere of acute paranoia. He tidied up that day's work, turned off the desk light and climbed into bed. Three hours until breakfast.

In the dark at the back of Winsbury's drawer, the edges of a few sheets of paper lifted gently. Upon reaching Winsbury's latest efforts, the drawer gave a jerk and the sheet was slammed down to the top of the pile. The drawer shot open, pages scattering.

* * *

Headmaster Llanwellyn jerked awake and hit his head on the back of his chair. The slapping of a thick stack of torn copybook pages landing on his desk woke him from peaceful slumber.

No one was in the room.

He picked up the closest dog-eared sheet and read it. He put it down a moment later and picked up another. His eyebrows were inching their way up his forehead as he made his way down the stack.

It seemed that he and Janet's young man needed to have a chat.

* * *

Mort was crawling, in spider form, along the corridors of the court towards the girls' dormitory when he caught sight of an angry Janet. She was positively bristling with indignation, clutching a bunch of papers in her hand. Winsbury was coming down the corridor with a few of his lackeys. There was destined to be some sort of nuclear explosion there.

Mort scarpered.


End file.
